Hopping into the new Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War Zombies mode, Outbreak? Well, we’re here to give you 10 tips and tricks to help you survive the undead in this new large-scale zombies mode. So let’s dive right on in.
Cold War Zombies Outbreak Tips & Tricks
1. Spend Your Aetherium Crystals Before You Start
Before you even start a game of Outbreak, make sure you’ve spent all your Aetherium Crystals you might have earned from Firebase Z or Die Maschine in the past.
Aetherium Crystals can be used to upgrade Weapon Classes, Field Upgrades, Perks and Ammo Mods. We tend to focus our Aetherium Crystals on upgrading the Perks and Field Upgrades first, as these can really come in clutch during later waves, especially Jugger-Nog Tier 3+.
2. Grind Out Early Waves
As is always the case with any Zombies game mode, the first round or two of Outbreak are pretty easy. Once you’ve completed the objective, you’ll be given a waypoint to a Portal which will take you to the next objective and begin a new wave.
Don’t go rushing into the portal as soon as it appears. Zombies will continue to spawn even after you’ve completed the objective, meaning you can farm low-health zombies for easy Points/Essence.
You can also use the Reward Machine and Trials Computer to grind out plenty of rewards for your loadout, such as Legendary and Epic weapons, if you level your rewards up enough before redeeming them.
This then means you’ll have plenty of points to spend on Pack-a-Punching your weapons and buying any Perks you might want.
3. Melee Zombies in Early Rounds – Cold War Zombies Outbreak Tips & Tricks
This one’s nice and simple. Zombies in the first wave or two can be killed with one melee hit. Use this to your advantage to conserve ammo and earn bonus points for getting a melee kill.
You can make your Melee even more effective by purchasing the ‘Melee’ Weapon Class upgrades, which at Tier 3 add a Bowie Knife to the butt of your weapon. This can one-hit-kill zombies for the first few rounds.
4. Play With Friends or be Willing to Communicate
Having played a few games of Outbreak with strangers and some with friends, one thing is abundantly clear: Communication is key.
If you’re playing with random players online, you’ll want to make sure you’re willing to speak up. Coordinate how you’re going to hold that room down, or when you need someone to use their Healing Aura Field Upgrade to save you from going down.
Playing with friends removes the awkwardness of chatting in a game of Outbreak, but communicating is just as important whether you’re playing with friends who know your playstyle or complete strangers.
5. Open Loot Chests – Cold War Zombies Outbreak Tips & Tricks
As you’re making your way to each objective, you might find little Loot Chests lying around that look like this:
Keep an eye out for these and open them whenever you get a chance. From our experience, they can contain grenades and other throwawable weapons/consumables, as well as armor plates.
There are different rarities of these Loot Chests, with the rarer ones packing in better weapons and items, so make these a priority.
6. Pack-a-Punch ASAP
If you heeded our previous advice, you’ll have spent a good chunk of time in Wave 1 killing zombies and grinding out some easy Points/ Essence.
Hopefully, if you’ve also completed the objective, you’ll now have enough to Pack-a-Punch your weapon. It’ll cost you 5,000 Points as always for Tier 1, but it’s well worth doing. It not only increases weapon damage, but reload speed, magazine size, and more.
Plus your gun looks and sounds cooler. Pew pew!
7. Pick Your Perks Wisely – Cold War Zombies Outbreak Tips & Tricks
All perks in Outbreak cost 2,500 Points/Essence, and can be bought from the vending machine in the same room as the Portal.
Don’t just go ahead and buy any random Perk, though. Make sure you’re prioritizing which you buy first. As a rule of thumb, we buy Jugger-Nog, Stamin-Up, and Quick Revive first, before moving onto the likes of Speed Cola afterwards.
In fact, we wouldn’t even worry about something like Elemental Pop at all. Those points could be better spent Pack-a-Punching your weapon to an even higher Tier. Or you can just buy the Brain Rot Ammo Mod from the Pack-a-Punch machine and save yourself a bit of Essence in the process.
8. Buy Armor & Weapon Damage Upgrades
In the same room as the Portal, you’ll also find the Arsenal machine with a mannequin in armor in a rack of sorts. It looks like this:
This is where you can buy armor and weapon upgrades for parts/scrap you pick up from dead zombies.
Buying armor will help you massively, as it allows you to tank more hits before you go down. If you fully upgrade it, it’s as good as having an extra life!
If you press R1/RB to tab over while interacting with the machine, you can also upgrade Weapon Damage with a different form of ‘scrap’ currency. These Weapon Damage upgrades make a bigger difference than Pack-a-Punching your weapon, and they can be done at a much earlier point, too.
9. Use Vehicles to Your Advantage – Cold War Zombies Outbreak Tips & Tricks
With Outbreak using the Fireteam maps from Black Ops Cold War’s Multiplayer mode, they’re pretty huge and take a while to get around.
To help you cut down your travel time from Portal to Objective and back again, you’ll almost always find vehicles lying around the map.
Yes, you can move about faster now, but they’re also really handy for running down hordes of the undead. They do take damage after you’ve charge through enough groups of zombies, but it’s a great way to quickly thin out huge swarms if you’re getting overwhelmed.
Even better, you drive through a horde and have a friend on the back finishing off any leftovers.
10. Don’t Forget About Your Field Upgrade
Field Upgrades are special abilities you can trigger by pressing LB + RB / L1 + R1. Our personal favorite is Healing Aura, as once you reach Tier 3 with it, it’ll revive downed teammates, as well as healing you up.
It can be easy to forget you’ve even got your Field Upgrade when you’ve got 100 zombies charging at you trying to eat your face. But make sure you’re checking its recharge status in the bottom right-hand corner frequently.
That’s it for our tips and tricks for Black Ops Cold War Zombies Outbreak mode. For more tips and tricks on the game, be sure to check out our wiki guide.
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